More stories

  • in

    Remnants of Ancient Life review: Explore the palaeobiology revolution

    Dale Greenwalt’s book is a gripping look at palaeobiology, a field achieving incredible insights into ancient life on Earth

    Humans

    11 January 2023

    By Simon Ings
    The palaeontology collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural Historychip clark/museum of natural history
    Remnants of Ancient Life
    Dale Greenwalt (Princeton University Press)
    WHAT is a fossil made of? Mineralised rocky fossils are what first spring to mind, but others, like the fossils of the Burgess Shale in Canada, are made of pure carbon and can be thought of as proto-coal. There are also tantalising Cretaceous insects preserved in amber.
    Whatever they are made of, fossils contain treasures. The first really good microscopic study of mineralised dinosaur bone was able to reveal its … More

  • in

    Why it is important to explore the outer limits of knowledge

    Science and reason generate reliable knowledge about the world, but they have their limits. Exploring them can shed light on what knowledge really is, and should help us gain more of it

    Humans

    | Leader

    11 January 2023

    Lagano/Shutterstock
    SCIENCE is the culmination of humanity’s attempts to reason about the world. It produces knowledge in a reliable way, and it has done so with great success. It has revealed many of nature’s secrets, from the molecular machinery inside cells to the grand scheme of how the universe began and evolved to what we see today. But for all their undoubted achievements, science and reason have their constraints.
    Our species is unique (as far as we know) in its ability to know what we don’t know. That alone might make us duty bound to explore the limits of knowledge and … More

  • in

    The best video games out in 2023

    Brain training apps claim to make us smarter, but there is no evidenceThere are plenty of apps that offer mental exercises claiming to make users smarter the more they play. Not only are they not much fun, but studies show they have no effect on performance, says Adrian Hon More

  • in

    Methylated gases could be an unambiguous indicator of alien life

    SEATTLE — Attention alien hunters: If you want to find life on distant planets, try looking for signs of toxic chemical cleanup. 

    Gases that organisms produce as they tidy up their environments could provide clear signs of life on planets orbiting other stars, researchers announced January 9 at the American Astronomical Society meeting. All we need to do to find hints of alien life is to look for those gases in the atmospheres of those exoplanets, in images coming from the James Webb Space Telescope or other observatories that could come online soon.

    Science News headlines, in your inbox

    Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your email inbox every Thursday.

    Thank you for signing up!

    There was a problem signing you up.

    Barring an interstellar radio broadcast, the chemistry of a remote planet is one of the more promising ways that researchers could detect extraterrestrial life. On Earth, life produces lots of chemicals that alter the atmosphere: Plants churn out oxygen, for example, and a host of animals and plants release methane. Life elsewhere in the galaxy might do the same thing, leaving a chemical signature humans could detect from afar (SN: 9/30/21).

    But many of life’s gases are also released in processes that have nothing to do with life at all. Their detection could lead to the false impression of a living planet in a faraway solar system, when it’s really just a sterile rock.

    At least one type of compound that some organisms produce to protect themselves from toxic elements, however, might provide unambiguous indications of life.

    The life-affirming compounds are called methylated gases. Microbes, fungi, algae and plants are among the terrestrial organisms that create the chemicals by linking carbon and hydrogen atoms to toxic materials such as chlorine or bromine. The resulting compounds evaporate, sweeping the deadly elements away.

    The fact that living creatures almost always have a hand in making methylated gases means the presence of the compounds in a planet’s atmosphere would be a strong sign of life of some kind, planetary astrobiologist Michaela Leung of the University of California, Riverside said at the meeting.

    The same isn’t true of oxygen and methane. Oxygen, in particular, can accumulate when a hot star warms a planet’s oceans. “You have a steam atmosphere, and the [ultraviolet] radiation from the star splits up the water” into its constituent parts, oxygen and hydrogen, Leung says. Hydrogen is light, so much of it is lost to space on small planets. “What you have left is all of this oxygen,” which, she says, leads to “really convincing oxygen signals in this process that at no point involved life.”

    Similarly, while living organisms produce methane in abundance, lifeless geological phenomena like volcanoes do too.

    Subscribe to Science News

    Get great science journalism, from the most trusted source, delivered to your doorstep.

    At the concentrations of methylated gases typical of Earth, these gases will be hard to see in the atmospheres of distant planets, even with an instrument as powerful as the Webb telescope (SN: 12/20/22). But Leung has reason to believe there may be planets where the gas abundance is thousands of times that of Earth.

    “The most productive environments [for releasing methylated gases] that we see here on Earth,” she says, “are things like estuaries and wetlands.” A watery planet with lots of small continents and correspondingly more coastline, for example, could be packed with organisms cleaning away toxic chemicals with methylated gases.

    One of the benefits of looking for the compounds as a sign of life is that it doesn’t require that the life resembles anything like what we have on our planet. “Maybe it’s not DNA-based, maybe it has other weird chemistry going on,” Leung says. But by assuming chlorine and bromine are likely to be toxic generally, methylated gases offer what Leung calls an agnostic biosignature, which can tell us that something is alive on a planet even if it’s utterly alien to us.

    “The more signs of life we know to look for, then the better our chances of recognizing life when we do encounter it,” says Vikki Meadows, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved with the study. “It also helps us understand what kind of telescopes we should build, what we should look for and what the instrument requirements should be. Michaela’s work is really important for that reason.” More

  • in

    White Noise review: Did this adaptation of a postmodern novel succeed?

    Noah Baumbach’s version of Don DeLillo’s award-winning novel may reflect the book’s complexity, but ultimately it could well justify fears the book is unfilmable

    Humans

    9 January 2023

    By Gregory Wakeman
    A scene from White Noise, showing, from left to right, Greta Gerwig (Babette), May Nivola (Steffie), Adam Driver (Jack), Samuel Nivola (Heinrich) and Raffey Cassidy (Denise)WILSON WEBB / NETFLIX ©2022
    White Noise
    Noah Baumbach
    Netflix, selected cinemas, including UK’s ICA on 5 January
    White Noise is brimming with ideas. And why wouldn’t it be? This film is the latest from writer-director Noah Baumbach, who created The Squid and The Whale and Marriage Story, smart, painful satires chronicling the breakdown of relationships.
    Baumbach adapted White Noise from the eponymous book (which won author Don … More

  • in

    Don’t Miss: The Last of Us – hit video game becomes a TV show

    New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

    Humans

    4 January 2023

    HBO/Warner Media
    Watch
    The Last of Us moves from award-winning video game to TV show, with Pedro Pascal (pictured above) as Joel Miller, a smuggler who escorts a teenage girl, Ellie (Bella Ramsey), across a post-apocalyptic US. On HBO from 15 January.

    Read
    Emotional Ignorance by neuroscientist Dean Burnett tracks the author’s journey after the death of his father from covid-19, as he explores where our emotions come from and what purpose they serve. On sale from 12 January.
    Paul Craft/shutterstock
    Visit
    The Science of Dreams reveals how and why we dream, and how to enhance our … More

  • in

    Awe review: Neglected feeling of awe could help battle climate change

    We pay little attention to the feeling of awe, but, as Dacher Keltner’s new book argues, it can make our lives more meaningful – and could even help us engage with huge problems like the climate crisis

    Humans

    4 January 2023

    By Sarah Phillips
    Mountain peaks are a sure way to create feelings of aweTetra Images, LLC/Alamy
    Awe
    Dacher Keltner (Allen Lane)
    IN JANUARY 2019, when Dacher Keltner was present at his younger brother Rolf’s bedside during the last moments of his life, he felt many things. Perhaps the most surprising was awe: “I felt small. Quiet. Humble. Pure. The boundaries that separated me from the outside world faded.”
    Awe is something that Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has now considered extensively. In 1988, when he asked his mentor Paul Ekman … More

  • in

    The Terraformers review: What do we owe the animals in our care?

    Annalee Newitz’s new novel examines the dark side of “uplifting” animals to a state of self-awareness – and asks whose intelligence is being used as the template, finds Sally Adee

    Humans

    4 January 2023

    By Sally Adee
    Terraforming means creating human values as much as physical placesTithi Luadthong/shutterstock
    The Terraformers
    Annalee Newitz (Tor Books on sale 2 February)
    IN A deep future tens of thousands of years from now, animals have been brought into the so-called Great Bargain: in saving Earth from the consequences of the Anthropocene, a deal has been struck between all creatures, and humans now include everyone in managing the shared land.
    But to participate, you need to be a person, and for that you must pass an intelligence assessment. So while relations between species look … More